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Special Projects to do in Ruby

By Michael Morin, About.com Guide

There are a lot of things you can do with Ruby. Over the past few years, Ruby has built up a number of large libraries and frameworks for making everything from web applications to games. The following multi-part articles walk you through some of the more interesting and complex things you can build with Ruby.

Sinatra
Game Programming
Ruby on Rails
Twitter API

Sinatra

Using Sinatra, a minimal web framework, to make small web applications. If you've never used Sinatra before, you're in for a surprise. It's not your typical bloated web application framework. In fact, the entire thing is less than 1,500 lines of Ruby code. Sinatra apps are quick, easy and quite fun to make.

Game Programming

Ruby's not just for the web, there are some great libraries for game programming in Ruby. While it may sound impossible or difficult to program games in Ruby (which, let's face it, isn't the fastest of languages), modern computers are more than capable of handling simple games in Ruby. This series of articles walks you through making a simple Space Invaders clone in Ruby.

Ruby on Rails

Rails is Ruby's "killer app," the reason many people have even heard of or start using Ruby. This series will walk you through creating a blog with Ruby on Rails.

Twitter API

Modern web sites are more than a collection of pages. These "web applications" often have interfaces other than the web pages you see in your web browser, they have APIs accessible from virtually any programming language. Twitter's API is a snap to use with Ruby, these articles will teach you how.

Ruby